Live Through This

Hole released their debut studio album, Pretty on the Inside, in 1991.[8] Despite moderate sales, the album was a critical success among English and American press.[9] In March 1992, following the album tour, drummer Caroline Rue and bassist Jill Emery left the band due to artistic differences.[10] In April 1992, vocalist Courtney Love and guitarist Eric Erlandson arranged auditions for a drummer at the Jabberjaw in Los Angeles and recruited drummer Patty Schemel.[11] Following the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles,[11] Love, Erlandson, and Schemel relocated to a Carnation, Washington home owned by Love and her husband, the Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, and began rehearsing and writing new material.[12] "We had been going more pop, less journal-entry noise stuff," said Erlandson.[3] Love said: "I was very competitive with Kurt because I wanted more melody. But I already wanted that before Live Through This."[3]

Originally signed to Caroline Records in the United States[13] and City Slang in Europe, Hole began record deal negotiations with Geffen Records in early 1992. In February 1992, they signed a seven-album deal[14] with Geffen subsidiary DGC Records, reportedly with "an advance of a million dollars and a royalty rate considerably higher than Nirvana's".[15] On November 8, 1992, Hole recorded "Beautiful Son", "20 Years in the Dakota" and "Old Age" at Word of Mouth Recording in Seattle with producer Jack Endino.[16] The songs were released in April 1993 as Hole's fourth single on the City Slang label. On January 21, 1993, Love and Schemel recorded five demos at BMG Ariola Ltda. in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.[17] Produced by Craig Montgomery, the session had originally been scheduled as a demo session for Nirvana, who were recording material for their upcoming studio album In Utero (1993).[18] During breaks in Nirvana's session, Love and Schemel recorded a number of songs later featured on Live Through This, including "Miss World", "She Walks on Me", "I Think That I Would Die" and "Softer, Softest".[17]

In 1993, the band recruited former Janitor Joe bassist Kristen Pfaff, also an accomplished cellist and music student.[3] Erlandson said of Pfaff's membership: "That's when we took off, all of a sudden we became a real band."[19] After a brief tour of the United Kingdom in mid-1993, the band sent a series of demos to the record label. "When we got the Live Through This demos, I realized very quickly that Hole had gotten a new rhythm section," said producer Sean Slade. "It was much more musical."[3]

The recording sessions for Live Through This began on October 8, 1993, at Triclops Sound Studios in Marietta, Georgia.[20] The studio was booked at the recommendation of the Smashing Pumpkins, who had recorded their second studio album, Siamese Dream (1993), there.[3] Hole hired the producers Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, as she and Cobain had enjoyed their work with Radiohead on their 1993 album Pablo Honey.[3] Erlandson recalled that Hole continued to write material throughout the recording sessions over the ensuing weeks: "We never finished writing; we were writing the whole time, trying to come up with more and more songs because even though it looked like we had a good, solid album, we knew we were missing some pieces. We were still writing intensely and frantically putting songs together. It wasn't like, "Oh we have these 12 songs, they're done, and we're going to go in and record now.""[3]

The first week of recording was spent recording basic tracks, including drums, bass, scratch guitars, and scratch vocals.[3] After basic tracks were completed, Cobain visited Hole in the studio before Nirvana were set to tour to promote In Utero.[3] While there, the band invited Cobain to sing backing vocals on several tracks,[21] which he initially refused, due to being unfamiliar with the material.[3] When Cobain asked, "How can I sing on it if I haven't heard it?", Love answered by encouraging him to "just sing off the top of [his] head". Cobain provided backing vocals on "Asking for It" and "Softer, Softest". Kolderie said Cobain sang on around five tracks, but could not remember exactly which. After taking a break for dinner, the session devolved into a jam with Cobain on drums, Love and Erlandson on guitars and Slade on bass.

Musician Dana Kletter sang backing vocals on seven songs, including "Violet", "Miss World", "Asking for It", "Doll Parts", "Softer, Softest", and "She Walks on Me".[22] Slade said, "I think one of the reasons that 'Doll Parts' might have been a hit is that harmony Dana does on the 'You will ache like I ache' part, it's almost like an Appalachian close harmony against what Courtney is doing. It's very melancholic."[23] Slade and Koderie avoided double tracking Love's vocals, as they felt it "took the fierceness away".[23] Certain imperfections were also left in the final mixes, including Love's voice cracking in "Doll Parts", which Geffen executives had asked to be removed.[24]

According to Schemel, an employee at Triclops Sound Studios offered the band crystal meth.[12] Schemel, her brother Larry Schemel and Pfaff would get high during the recording. "Miss World" was one of the songs Schemel and Pfaff recorded while high and Schemel said "that song was recorded a bit altered".[12] Slade said that the basic tracks were completed within five days, and that Pfaff's basslines were completed on the basic tracks: "This has never happened on an album that we've done in all these years — every single bass track on Live Through This was from the basic tracks. There was no bass overdubs because there was no need to because they were perfect."[3] Love completed between ten and twelve tracks of vocals for each song, which were then arranged by Slade and Kolderie.[3]

The band finished recording on October 31, after which production and mixing lasted an additional nineteen days.[3] The album was mixed by Scott Litt in Los Angeles and Seattle, except for "Gutless", which was mixed by J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. in New York City.[25]

The album's back artwork features a childhood photo of Love in Springfield, Oregon

Fashion model Leilani Bishop is shown on the cover of the album, shot by photographer Ellen von Unwerth, dressed in beauty pageant attire with a tiara and a bouquet of flowers, with mascara running down her eyes in tears of joy.[46] Love stated in an interview that she "wanted to capture the look on a woman's face as she's being crowned...  this sort of ecstatic, blue eyeliner running, kind of 'I am, I am—I won! I have hemorrhoid cream under my eyes and adhesive tape on my butt, and I had to scratch and claw and fuck my way up, but I won Miss Congeniality!'"[47] The band logo introduced on the front cover of the album shares stylistic similarity to the contemporary Mattel Barbie logo.[48]

The back cover of the album features a family photo of Courtney Love during her childhood in Springfield, Oregon,[49] with the individual track listings appearing to the right, printed on embossing tape. Music scholar Ronald Lankford commented on the contrast between the images on the front and back cover, interpreting the back image of Love as symbolizing the "antithesis of the contest winner on the cover. The young girl, then, seems to represent femininity in its natural state, before the fall of adolescence."[47]

Live Through This was released on April 12, 1994, by DGC Records on compact disc and cassette in North America.[20] Overseas, the album received a short-lived LP pressing by City Slang on a standard black vinyl and a limited white vinyl.[50] The album was dedicated to the memory of Joe Cole, a roadie for Black Flag and the Rollins Band who was shot to death in a December 1991 robbery after attending a Hole concert at the Whisky a Go Go.[51][52]

The album debuted on the U.S. Billboard 200 at number 55, eventually peaking at number 52 in January 1995 during its 68-week stay.[53] In December 1994, the record went gold, having sold a total of 500,000 copies, and went platinum six months later for having sold one million copies. As of 2010, the album had sold more than 1.6 million copies in the United States[7] and has well over 2 million worldwide. It has also achieved platinum status in Canada and Australia.[54]

In June 1994, just before Hole was scheduled to embark on an international tour to support the album, bassist Pfaff was found dead in her Seattle apartment of a heroin overdose.[55][56][57] The tour was subsequently postponed until the end of the summer, after which Melissa Auf der Maur, a Canadian bassist from Montreal, was hired to join the band and accompany them on tour.[58]

Four singles were released from the album and three promotional videos were shot, for "Miss World" (still with Kristen Pfaff), "Doll Parts" (with L7's bassist Jennifer Finch replacing her) and "Violet" (already with Melissa Auf der Maur). "Softer, Softest" was also released as a single, and Hole's performance of this song at their MTV Unplugged session was used as a promotional video.

Authorship allegations

Upon the album's release, rumors circulated that Courtney Love's deceased husband, Kurt Cobain, had co-written several of its tracks

Following the album's release, rumors began circulating alleging that Love's recently deceased husband, Cobain, had ghostwritten some of the songs.[59] Although these rumors circulated for years to follow, multiple songs on Live Through This had been written and performed during Hole's Pretty on the Inside tour: Both "Violet" and "Doll Parts", among other tracks, were written in 1991 during the release of Pretty on the Inside.[60] The first studio recordings of the songs took place during a BBC Radio broadcast for John Peel in 1991, in between US and European tours to promote Pretty on the Inside;[61][62] these recordings would later appear on the group's 1995 EP Ask for It.

In a 2006 Time magazine piece, it was noted that "[the rumors] started immediately that it was Cobain, not his wife, Courtney Love, who wrote the majority of these churningly catchy songs. Forget that there's no proof, that their marriage was collaborative and that it's a nasty thing to say, Live Through This is clearly a woman's work [and is] far more swaggering than any album any grunge man ever came up with. When Love sings, "I went to school in Olympia / Where everyone's the same," it's obvious she thinks she's not, and that she's right."[59] Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic wrote that the main reason Live Through This marked a drastic sonic departure from Pretty on the Inside (a reason cited in arguments that it had been ghostwritten) is "Love's desire to compete in the same commercial alternative rock arena as her husband... while [Cobain having ghostwritten] is unlikely, there's no denying that his patented stop-start dynamics, barre chords, and punk-pop melodies provide the blueprint for Live Through This. Love adds her signature rage and feminist rhetoric to the formula."[2]

"Kurt sang backing vocals on two songs. He wrote one B-side for Hole ("Old Age"), uncredited. And that was it. It would be just as accurate – and misleading – to say that Courtney Love wrote most of Nirvana's third album, In Utero: you can certainly see her influence in Kurt's lyrics. Before the pair met, it was often guesswork as to his intentions. Afterwards, his lyrics were far more direct."

–Journalist Everett True on the songwriting allegations[63]

Love made several responses to the songwriting allegations, first in 1998: "All this time I have never addressed this. But here I am finally saying for the very first time that Kurt did not [write] Live Through This. I mean for fuck's sake, his skills were much better than mine at the time – the songs would have been much better. That's the first thing."[64] Love later addressed the issue, stating: "I wanted to be better than Kurt. I was really competing with Kurt. And that's why it always offends me when people would say, "Oh, he wrote Live Through This." I'd be proud as hell to say that he wrote something on it, but I wouldn't let him. It was too Yoko [Ono] for me. It's like, "No fucking way, man! I've got a good band, I don't fucking need your help."[3] Drummer Patty Schemel, a longtime friend of Cobain's, also denied this, commenting in 2011: "There is that myth that Kurt wrote a lot of our songs— it's not true. Eric [Erlandson] and Courtney wrote Live Through This."[27] Although the band members denied Cobain's involvement in the songwriting, they have openly stated that Cobain was briefly in the studio and performed uncredited backup vocals with Kristen Pfaff on two of the tracks: "Asking for It", and "Softer, Softest".[3] Cobain biographer Charles R. Cross conducted interviews with everyone associated with the making of the record, and found that all parties agreed that Love and Erlandson wrote the songs.[27]

The album's liner notes collectively credit Hole as the sole composers of the album, aside from two tracks: "I Think That I Would Die", on which Kat Bjelland served as a co-writer, and "Credit in the Straight World", a Young Marble Giants cover written by Stuart Moxham.[65] However, according to the BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated) repertoire, the songwriting credits of the majority of the album's tracks belong solely to Courtney Love[66] and Eric Erlandson,[67] while "Doll Parts" is credited to Love alone.[68]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[69]
Blender	[70]
Chicago Tribune	[71]
Christgau's Consumer Guide	A[72]
Entertainment Weekly	B+[73]
NME	8/10[74]
Pitchfork	10/10[75]
Rolling Stone	[76]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[77]
Spin	9/10[78]

Live Through This was lauded by music critics and rock periodicals in 1994,[79][53] and was included in various annual best-of lists: It was ranked the number one album of 1994 by critics in Rolling Stone, Spin, the Los Angeles Times,[80] and the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll.[79][81][82] It was also named among the best five albums of the year by several Canadian publications, including the Edmonton Journal and the Toronto Star.[83]

In their review, Rolling Stone noted that "Love delivers punk not only as insinuating as Nirvana's but as corrosive as the Sex Pistols'. More significantly, Live Through This may be the most potent blast of female insurgency ever committed to tape."[84] Entertainment Weekly gave the album a B+ rating, saying, "What Live Through This makes perfectly clear, though, is that Love is a greater star. She has charisma and attitude to burn, and she knows it."[73] NME called the album "a personal but secretive thrash-pop opera of urban nihilism and passionate dumbthinks",[74] and Melody Maker called it "the high watermark of the genre that survived the crass label of 'foxcore'..."[85]

In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau noted the album's less caustic sound but praised Love's songwriting: "Punk aesthetic or no punk aesthetic, Courtney Love's songs wouldn't be compromised and might be deepened by steeper momentum and more articulate guitar noise. But they prevail anyway. Their focus is sexual exploitation, and not just by the media, evil straights, and male predators of every cultural orientation. She's also exploited by Courtney Love, and not only does she know it, she thinks about it."[86]

Musician Magazine wrote, "[Kurt] Cobain's much-discussed, little heard other half finally gets the chance to escape gossip-column purgatory and succeeds with flying colors... Courtney Love's foul, funny eloquence...cuts through all the bullshit with a mighty flourish."[87] This sentiment was reassessed in a 2008 BBC review of the album, which stated, "In 1994 and the years that followed, tragedy and controversy seemed to overshadow everything Courtney Love touched. Thankfully, with every year that passes, it becomes easier to put the record's emotional baggage to one side and appraise it on the strength of its songs."[88]

"Since Pretty on the Inside, Courtney has learnt the art of writing a decent pop hook," observed Select's Clark Collis. "Disgorging your cathartic trauma in the studio is an admirable pastime but, if you really want to compete with Corgan, Vedder or even Cobain, then the Top 40 is still where it's at."[89] Spin reviewed Live Through This very favorably with a 9/10 rating, noting, "Love rode her band's gargantuan riffs through a shy loner's air-guitar fantasy: rock stardom as revenge upon the entire human race."[81]

In the United States, Live Through This peaked at number 52 on the US Billboard 200 chart, and spent 68 weeks on the chart, making it the band's longest charting album in the US.[102] It was ranked at number 86 on the year end chart of the Billboard 200.[103] It was certified Platinum in the US in 1995 with one million copies sold. The album has sold 1.6 million copies in the US to date.[104]

The album peaked at number 13 in the UK and charted for 17 weeks.[105] It was certified Gold in the UK in 2013, with 100,000 copies sold.[106] In Australia, it peaked at number 13 and spent 16 weeks on the chart. It was certified Gold in the country, with 70,000 copies sold.[107]

• "Rock Star" is a mislabel of the outtake "Olympia". (see Composition)

• Live Through This at AllMusic